Philip Nanton is Honorary Research Associate of the University of Birmingham. He was born in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, studied and lived in Britain from 1960 to 2000 and has since lived in Barbados. He has published reviews of contemporary Caribbean literature in journals and magazines including Caribbean Review of Books, Shibboleths: a Journal of Theory and Criticism and Caribbean Quarterly.
He has more recently developed as a writer of humour and a spoken word performer. In 2008, he released a CD, Island Voices from St. Christopher and the Barracudas: the book based on the CD was published in 2014 by Papillote Press.
He has performed sketches from this collection across the region from Guyana to Jamaica. His second collection of sketches and poetry, Canouan Suite and Other Pieces (Papillote Press, 2016) was highly recommended in the 2018 Cuban Casa de las Americas Awards for Anglophone Caribbean Literature. In 2017, he published Frontiers of the Caribbean (Manchester University Press). He published Riff: The Shake Keane Story (Papillote Press) in 2021, a biography of the Vincentian jazz musician and poet Shake Keane.
